“Mother,” Diomedes says, nodding his head and dutifully receiving the kiss she puts on his brow, not knowing what to do. “Why are you here?”
“To voice my dissent.”
He eyes the men behind her. “And the men?”
“To ensure that dissent is heard,” Bellerephon says.
“I wasn’t talking to you, cousin,” Diomedes snaps. He steps toward his mother. “I know you and Father have had your differences, but this…this is beyond the pale. It is unforgiveable.”
“So many things are unforgiveable.” She shrugs. “I’m only visiting my husband. But why do I feel I’ve caught him with his hand on the water jug? Has he a paramour here? Come out, paramour!” She frowns. “No? None?” She makes a show of looking around. “None at all?”
“Are you quite done?” Romulus asks.
“Oh, Romulus, I’ve hardly just begun.” She fans out her cloak and folds her legs to sit across from him. Cassius waits with me in the shadows of the pillar, watching the door. There are too many Golds to escape.
“Wait,” I whisper to him. “Let them sort it out.” It pains him to sit and watch, but the new Golds are our only hope.
“Did you fire upon my escort vessel outside?” Romulus asks.
She shrugs innocently. “I remove obstacles from my path.”
“And my Krypteia?”
“Sorted.”
“You raise a hand against your Sovereign,” Marius hisses. “Have you both finally lost your wits?”
“No,” Dido sneers. “I have not lost my wits, you venomous, loathsome toad. You have lost yours, if you ever had any to begin with.”
“Mother—” Diomedes begins.
She holds up a single finger. “Mother is speaking.” She looks back to her husband as her large son lowers his head. “Did you think you could keep this a secret? From me? From the council? Shutter my bright child away and I would be none the wiser or worse about it?”
“Must we do this in public?”
“What have we to hide?” She smiles. “Do you know why she even went into the Gulf?”
“Because you sent her after your folly.”
This catches Dido off guard.
“You knew. But did not arrest me?”
“You are my wife,” he says as if that answers everything. I watch for some sign of affection to take hold of her. Even on Luna, their love was something of fable. Romulus and Dido, the star-crossed lovers who burned a city for their love. But the years, it seems, have dimmed their star. And now Dido pulls back away from Romulus, a look of disgust spreading across her face.
“Then you are a coward.”
“Perhaps. Are you more angry that I have faces you cannot see, or that I showed you mercy?” Romulus asks, amused.
“Where is the man I married?” she whispers. “The man who could carry a world on his shoulders? I look for him, but all I find is this withered, cowed creature you’ve become. If you were an Iron Gold, you would have sent me to the dust.”
Romulus sighs, unaffected. “All this Venusian prattle and bluster…You’re wading in the shallows, my dear. Shall we cross the Rubicon?” He looks past her to address the fifty Gold who’ve followed her into the room. More pack the hall outside. They watch from behind filtered reflective goggles, their cloaks making them look like devilish bats gathered in the shadows. “Children of the Dust, you stand before your Sovereign uninvited, wearing weapons and hiding your eyes like Horde filth. Remove them and kneel.”
They do not.
“I said kneel.”
Not a man moves. “There we have it,” Romulus says. “Alea iacta est.”
“You are a Sovereign, not a king, my love,” Dido says, her humor fled. “You have forgotten that, as did the old Luna bitch.” My blood stirs at the mention of my grandmother, even if her words are true enough. “Forgotten that you are expected to serve the will of the Moon Lords from Io to Titan. As you cloister yourself here, men loyal to the Rim seize control of Sungrave. They move against your Praetors in their ships, your Imperators in their barracks. By dawn, patriots will have control of Io, and I, as its Protector, will serve until such time that a new Sovereign can be elected.”
He smiles ruefully. “You may seize Io, but you cannot hold her. The people will not forget your birthright. A gahja till I made you my wife.”
“Don’t you start with me too….”
“The blood of my ancestors watered this moon. Their hands shaped her. She is ours and we are hers. You are not a Raa, no matter your brood. I make you a Raa.” He leans forward, baring his teeth. “Ganymede, Callisto, Europa, they will all fall upon you, and then Norvo and the rest of them will come and you will have spent your life and mine for nothing.”
“Perhaps.”
“Seraphina brought back nothing.”
“Is that a fact?” She stands to look down at him. A dozen of her men come forward. “Romulus au Raa, you are under arrest.” I wait for her to say the word “treason,” as does Romulus, but it never comes. “Bellerephon, seize him.”
Flanked by his men, Bellerephon steps forward. Diomedes’s hasta snaps up from his waist and forms into a two-meter-long lance. He points the long black length at his cousin. “Aevius, Bellerephon, as much as I love you, take another step and you will be for the worms.”
“Come now, cousin. Don’t be truculent,” Bellerephon says. But Diomedes does not relent.
“Son…” Dido says. “Your duty is to the Compact. Your father has violated it…”
“By protecting Seraphina?”
“For other sins.”
“You have evidence?”
“Forthcoming.”
“Insufficient.” He does not move.
She sighs. “Disarm Diomedes. Kill anyone who isn’t dragonblood.” Dido’s men hesitate, looking to Bellerephon for confidence. He nods them forward and they move as one toward Romulus and his defenders, their long razors held in two hands above their heads. Diomedes lifts his rigid razor to his lips. He closes his eyes and kisses the metal. Then his eyes open, and the spirit behind them bears no kindness.
When Diomedes moves, they begin to die.
He skims diagonally across the front rank of his mother’s men with such possession of his body that it seems he were another species entirely. One made of wind and wrath. He sidesteps two of their thrusts and removes the head of the one he called Aevius, and exchanges two parries with a thickset woman before pulling a second, shorter razor called a kitari from his belt, and skewering her stomach and ripping sideways through half her rib cage. Aevius’s body hits the stone and the woman stands there trying to stuff intestine and mesentery back into her abdomen before collapsing to her knees, bubbling screams from her mouth. Bellerephon and Diomedes crash together at the end of Diomedes’s assault. I watch in awe, and glance at Cassius. I thought he was the greatest Gold swordsman left. By the look on his face, I know now that presumption was shared and mutually shattered the moment Diomedes moved.
Sparks fly from the long razors of Diomedes and Bellerephon before they separate, both of far greater skill than the men around them. The other Golds encircle Diomedes, about to close on him from his flanks when his brother Marius lunges forward clumsily and sheathes his blade through the eye socket of a rangy Peerless. He’s slashed in the side of the head by Bellerephon. He reels back, like a child struck by a father, losing his right ear and very nearly his right eye. Flesh flaps open. Bellerephon kills two of the bodyguards as Diomedes takes one more of his lot. Vela is about to throw herself into the fray as Dido’s other men shoulder their rifles to gun the unarmored Raa down.
“Hold!” Dido shouts, stopping Bellerephon and Diomedes from cutting one another apart. Bellerephon draws back to her side, warily watching his cousin.
“No hand touches my father,” Diomedes growls as more Peerless encircle him. His eyes stay on Bellerephon, the most dangerous of the traitors. Marius and Vela tighten to make a hydra fighting formation, their spines pressed together as blood sheets down
Marius’s neck. Clearly no warrior, he looks ridiculous amongst the rangy killers, like an overgrown glass figurine trying to dance with boulders. Despite their earlier friction, Diomedes angles himself to protect his younger brother.
Diomedes points his gore-covered weapon at his mother.
“You would kill your own mother?” Dido asks, stepping past her men toward him till the tip of his razor rests against her right breast. She leans into it. Blood wells through her tan armor. “Me. Who carried you in my womb. Me who nursed you on my flesh, on my milk.” She leans forward, centimeter by centimeter letting the blade enter into her body. “Me who pushed you into this world.”
“Enough,” Romulus says coldly. “You waste our blood. Let them take me. I have nothing to hide.”
Only when Romulus sets a hand on Diomedes’s shoulder does his son lower the blade. At her brother’s instruction, Vela lets her own weapon clatter to the ground. Once the rest of Romulus’s men are unarmed, Dido’s come forward warily and bind Romulus and his kin.
It ends as fast as it began. If this were a coup of the Core, Romulus and the rest of us would have been mowed down from the door. Fast and clean, with blame placed where it does further good—that is how my grandmother dealt with her rivals. It is how she told me I should deal with mine.
Seraphina enters with her mother’s men as her father is escorted out. Her eyes follow him with deep sadness. Dido bends by the dead Golds and tips a finger into each of their blood and spreads it on her Peerless scar as a Rim sign of respect. “See that they are sent to the dust with all honors,” she tells her lancer.
“Seraphina,” Dido says. The women embrace.
“Tell me you found it.”
“I did. You told me no one would be hurt.”
“Diomedes.” Her mother shrugs as if that explains it.
I stand up behind the pillar. Cassius joins me hesitantly. “Shall we try this again?” I ask.
He winces. “Let me guess. You want to talk. Go on. Use that silver tongue.”
“With pleasure.”
We step out together from our hiding place. The women turn to us. Their men rush forward with their razors. Cassius and I are knocked again to our knees.
“We get the gorydamn point,” Cassius mutters when one grabs his hair.
“The infamous gahja,” Dido says with a laugh. “Hiding like mice.”
I look at Seraphina. “We never had a proper chance at introductions. I am Castor au Janus. This is my brother, Regulus. Pleased to finally meet you. Now, considering I saved you from being a three-course Obsidian feast, would it be terribly rude of me to ask for a bath?”
“They saved my life,” Seraphina says in amusement.
“Saved your life?” Dido is annoyed. “I did not send you because you are a woman who needs saving. But still…My goodmen, I do not believe my husband showed you proper hospitality. Men of the Rim can be so blunt. Prithee, excuse him and let me amend the oversight.” She has her men unclasp the muzzles and opens a foil packet of wafers from a pocket on her armor and breaks a wafer in half to give to us. She pushes the pieces into our mouths, but we’re too dehydrated to swallow them down until her men push canteens to our cracked lips. “You are now my guests. And guests need not kneel.”
WE FLY LOW AND FAST over the bucking sea. A storm has risen over the Atlantic, heaving up mountainous waves of cresting foam. With a howl of joy over the coms, Sevro leads his squadron through a wall of water. They look like sea lions, their scarabSkin oily and glistening wet as they weave above and through the churn, red beacon lights blinking from the heels of their gravBoots.
I dive into a wave, Thraxa au Telemanus to my right, and rip back up toward the dark sky.
It is liberating to be an outlaw once again. Octavia was right. Legitimacy and reign come with heavy burdens. But so too has my emancipation. With Wulfgar’s death, I ignited a wildfire across the Republic that has shifted popular opinion against the war and my wife. Even incorruptible Caraval raves for my arrest. For the last month, we’ve been holed up in an abandoned military base on Greenland, preparing for this mission. From the too-small cot in the cold barracks, I’ve watched Mustang give speeches in the Senate and fend off calls for impeachment. If it weren’t for her summoning Wulfgar and the knights personally to her estate, she would be out of office. Somehow she clings on.
In the pale light of the old holoCan, she looks so pure, so above the tarnish that Wulfgar’s death has put on my soul. I can’t help but feel I’ve sullied her too with the blood of a good man. I project an air of jocular confidence to my men. Many of them knew Wulfgar. But at night, when the winds sweep in off the sea to howl against the concrete bunker, I’m plagued by the demons the world has given me. Even more so by those I’ve made for myself. I can only fall asleep to the sound of her voice.
They say Republics are naturally eager to devour their heroes. I always thought my Republic was the exception. Now, Copper and Red holoNews pundits, who once objected to the ArchWarden being an Obsidian, have made Wulfgar a martyr. They rail for my capture, declaring me a menace to peace. A warmonger. Useful once, a liability now. It wounds me, but not as much as it wounds Sevro. He blames himself for Wulfgar’s death, and has shrunken inward, growing sullen in the absence of his family. Fearful, I imagine, that his daughters will believe those who say we are wrong.
We may not ever be welcomed back.
There’s nothing worse for a soldier to imagine—that there will be no home to return to once the violence is over, no way to become the men we want to be. Instead, we’re trapped in these violent guises, guises we only ever had the courage to don because of how much we love our home. Is this all we’ll ever be? Is this what I’ve made Sevro become forever?
Republic Intelligence searches for us. I know many of those men and women. They’re no fools. But they search deep space for signs of my passage to Mars and Mercury, thinking I would retreat either to my homeworld or the legions, where the populace or military would rally around me. They still don’t understand me. The only thing that lies in the tunnels of Mars or upon the desert planet is the possibility of civil war. Were I to consolidate power, I would make Mars or the legions choose a side. I would rend our fledgling Republic in two. Exactly what I believe the Ash Lord intended. No. The key to Venus and to the end of this war isn’t with my army. It lies beneath the waves of Earth.
Our quarry, a lonely deep-sea trawler, glows on the horizon.
At the mercy of the waves, it rides a giant swell up and then disappears behind the range of foaming water. For a moment, I think it’s capsized. I bank up above the water, gaining altitude till I see it riding down the slope of a wave. It is one hundred meters from stem to stern. And as I descend upon it, I see its red paint has long since given way to rust and the gnaw of the sea. Huge yellow plastic crab containers at the back of the ship rock uneasily against their restraints. Men in yellow coats labor desperately to add extra lashings to tie the loose containers down. Another wave catches the ship and it rocks hard to port, throwing one of the men into the sea and snapping his safety cable.
“Mine!” Sevro says. There’s a chorus of challenges and the game is afoot. His squadron surges forward, some diving under the water, others bowing upward to retrieve the sailor. Breaking free of the pack, Alexandar au Arcos skims tight to the surface of the water, then recklessly close to the hull before slicing down into the water just before Sevro does. A moment later Alexandar resurfaces on the far side, spiraling in the air like a surfacing dolphin, dragging the sailor up by his severed safety cord. He lowers him roughly onto the deck and lands dramatically on a knee to a chorus of boos on the com.
“Superior genetics for the win,” he crows. “Be not ashamed, geriatric friends.”
“Shut your gob, Pixie,” Sevro mutters in defeat.
Sevro and the rest of his squadron emerge from the water around the boat and land with Alexandar amongst the terrified crabbers. Most of the crabbers are Red, with a scattering of Obsidians and Browns t
aken to the sea to make their living. I slow my speed and descend less dramatically to land nearer the pilot’s cabin. The captain, a bearded Brown with a continental-sized paunch, stares at me from the open hatch, his magnetic boots steadying him against the rocking of the ship.
“Plebian, are you the captain of this vessel?” I ask through my helmet in as haughty a Venusian accent as I can muster. He just stares at me, eyes fixed on the dull gray Society pyramid on my armor’s chest and on the demonic visages of the scarab masks. I am the world he thought gone forever, now returned. “Kneel,” I growl. The man falls to a knee. More Howlers land—only the tallest of our number, to complete the illusion—till there’s twelve of us clad in the military accoutrement of a Society commando squad. Our helmets, our masks for the day, remain on.
I feared resistance in the crew and am relieved to only see terror. They fall to their knees, eyes downcast in fear of their returned overlords. Only the two Obsidians amongst the crew stare up at us in hatred from under their water-repellant hoods.
“We’re just crabbers,” the captain mumbles, trying to come to grips with his new reality. “Nothin’ military on board…”
“Silence, whelp. You will address me as dominus. This ship, like you, is property of the Ash Lord. Prithee, Captain, assemble your men in the cargo hold and none of you will be liquidated.” I eye the Obsidians amongst his crew. “Any attempts on the lives of my men will result in the decimation of your crew in its entirety. Defiance is death. Do you understand?”
“Yes?”
“Yes, what?” Thraxa snarls.
“Yes…dominus.”
I feel a dark pit open in my gut and motion my men to take command of the vessel.
We commandeer the boat and deactivate their radio and satellite communications and consolidate the crabbers into the cargo hold with jugs of water. Pebble welds the doors shut in case they feel a flush of patriotism coming on. Soon, the rest of our number come with Colloway on his pelican. It floats above the water on the port side of the crabber and drops the submersible we took from our weapons cache on Luna’s orbital docks. The submersible lands with a huge splash. Then the pelican sets down on the exposed deck of the crabber. Some of the lowColor Howlers—Winkle, Min-Min, and Rhonna—disembark carrying gear. The rest of the support staff, including my brother Kieran, are on Baffin Island, waiting with our escape vessel.